


Survivors

by Elendiliel



Series: A Medic's Guide to the Galaxy [2]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-19
Updated: 2020-09-19
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:20:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26545906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elendiliel/pseuds/Elendiliel
Summary: Pain and death are part of life, especially for medics and empaths. Nurse Elinor Macnab of the Resistance knows this all too well - she happens to fall into both categories. In her short career, she's tended hundreds of patients and counselled dozens of grieving friends and relatives. But when tragedy strikes close to home, who will do the same for her?
Series: A Medic's Guide to the Galaxy [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1954132





	Survivors

**Author's Note:**

> The chronology of these stories is a bit messy - I'm posting them in the order they demanded to be written down. This one is some time between The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, and between the events of Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 of Unlikely Friends, Unseen Enemies.
> 
> I'm aware that near the end I've probably appeared to cut across some very strongly held opinions. If that is so, I can only apologise and blame a most ill-regulated imagination. Don't worry, I have no intention of retconning any of my source material, official or otherwise.

“They’re gonna be late.”

Rey nodded. She and Poe were waiting for the medical team that had come with them to help evacuate this forward base, which had barely got established before the First Order had taken an interest. Something in the atmosphere distorted scanners, which was why this planet had been chosen, but of course they had responded by carpet-bombing the whole area from orbit. A first pass had caught the edge of the base, with “only” light casualties, but the Resistance unit knew they wouldn’t be so lucky a second time. So they had asked the main base for immediate evacuation, which meant the _Millennium Falcon_ , which this time meant Rey and Poe, along with a doctor and two nurses. The base personnel were pretty much all aboard now, the wounded in a bunk room that had been hastily retrofitted as a med-bay after Crait and everyone else wherever they could find space. Just the medics to go now. They were on the other side of the complex, making a final sweep, checking for more survivors of the first attack, but the bombardment was getting closer…

Someone in the First Order ship above them must have been a bit trigger-happy, or had bad aim. A stray shot, well ahead of the rest, hit the building where Rey was sure the medical team had been at their last report. She resisted the urge to run straight for it. She knew about wrecks, and how easily they could collapse. Instead, she reached out through the Force, looking for one of the nurses. Elinor Macnab, El if you needed her in a hurry, was a relatively weak but quite skilful Force-sensitive and unofficially Leia’s other, part-time apprentice. They had trained together often enough since Crait that Rey could pick her out from a crowd in seconds. This should be easy. Where was she now, though?

There! She was shielding her emotions as strongly as she could, but her life force still burned like a candle flame against the darkness. Rey called out to her, mind to mind. “Are you all right?”

The reply was slow to come, but that wasn’t unusual. El wasn’t good with words at the best of times. “Nothing to write home about. Some assistance would be welcome.” That was El-speak for _get over here, now!_ Telling Poe to prep the _Falcon_ , she raced towards her friend (although the intensity of their shared training rendered _friend_ inadequate; _heart-sister_ would be better) as fast as she dared.

The damage wasn’t as bad as she’d feared, but that wasn’t saying much. One wall and a chunk of roof were entirely missing, and there was debris everywhere, but the remainder looked stable. Three figures were visible in the wreckage, two of them worryingly still. The third, of course, was El. She was crouched down next to the battered, broken, but still breathing body of her other mentor, Dr Kalonia. Her angular face was even paler than usual, which was quite an achievement. Blood was starting to mat her dark hair and wick through the torn sleeve of her uniform, but otherwise she seemed unharmed, and even managed a smile as Rey approached. “How is she?”

“Stable, now, but her spine’s damaged. I can’t fix it here, and I don’t dare move her by myself. I could so easily make things worse.”

Rey knelt down beside the young nurse. Her face was now utterly devoid of expression, which had to be a first. Empaths like her tended to be passionate, uncomplicated people who said what they thought and showed how they felt, although El kept some feelings private. (Not as many as she thought, sometimes.) “What do you need me to do?”

“I’ve cobbled together a stretcher to get her back to the _Falcon_. I’d like you to put her on it as carefully as possible. Can you do that?” Telekinesis was one of Rey’s specialities, but El found it impossible.

“Of course.” Compared to some of the exercises she’d done, this was simple. El visibly relaxed as the older woman was gently moved onto the stretcher that El appeared to have made from a metal door, unhinged by the blast. Rey looked over to the third member of the medical team, whom she would have described as unhurt were it not for the fact that he wasn’t breathing. “What about him?”

El seemed to close in on herself even more. “Nothing to be done. He didn’t suffer.” Further explanation was apparently beyond her. “No other survivors. We’d better move.”

 _I imagine he didn’t, but I suspect you did_ , Rey thought to herself as she levitated the stretcher and patient, gently but firmly rejecting El’s offer of help, and they headed back to the _Falcon_ with all sensible speed. El didn’t just feel others’ emotions so deeply that they might as well be her own – she could _make_ them her own. What happened to them then, Rey wasn’t sure. It wasn’t her field.

She was curious about one thing, though. “How did you make this? I didn’t see any tools around.” Parts of the improvised stretcher had been melted, bent or welded into place.

El held up her right hand. The fingers were burnt and blackened. “Pain. Externalised, it becomes heat. And fear,” she held out her left hand, the fingertips of which were white, almost blue, “absorbs heat.” She noticed Rey’s alarm at the damage. “I know how to deal with this. The right salve, half an hour, and I’ll be right as rain.” _On the outside_ went unspoken.

They carried on in silence. Poe was waiting for them, almost frantic with worry. Leaving the base and those who had fallen there to the tender mercies of the First Order, they reached the temporary safety of hyperspace just in time and turned their attention to their passengers.

***

Poe was concerned about El, to say the least. They might not officially be a couple, or even much of a couple in the usual sense, but “girlfriend” (or the more old-fashioned “young lady”) was still the best way to describe what she was to him, which made her his responsibility. The distress call had come at the end of her second shift in a row, but she had still volunteered for this duty. “No” did not feature prominently in her vocabulary. He hadn’t realised she was coming until it was too late to dissuade her. And now, with one friend and colleague dead and another in a critical condition, and herself no doubt more badly injured than she let on, she was _still_ going about her duties, tending the wounded and consoling the bereaved as best she could. He and Rey were doing the same, of course, but El was determined to take the lead and most of the work, distracting herself from what had just happened. He knew what would happen when she had no more to do, and that he had to be there when it did.

Not just then, though. They were approaching the main Resistance base, and the cross-grained old freighter needed two people to land safely. Poe, Rey and El saw their charges safely into the base, shuttling the casualties straight to med-bay. Finally, El turned to Poe and asked, “Is that everyone?”

“Yep, think so.”

“Good.” Poe caught her before she hit the floor, already fast asleep. Rey, telling him to “look after her” (as though he needed the reminder), headed off to report to Leia, leaving Poe to clean and dress the injuries to El’s head and arm she had so far refused to let him treat. She didn’t stir once, nor when he picked her up and carried her to her bed at the back of med-bay, nor even when he removed the datapad from her forearm and the holorecorder from around her neck. Taking her earrings out – two small silver flowers – was trickier, and for a moment he thought she would wake up, but exhaustion had a firm grip on her. He found a chair from somewhere and settled down for a few hours’ rest, intending to be there when she woke up.

Which he was, more or less. He opened his eyes to see her sitting on the edge of her bed, swaying slightly, but clearly planning on getting up and going to work just as soon as the room came back into focus. As she tried to put this plan into action, he gripped her shoulders and pushed her back down. “You’re going nowhere.” He moved to sit beside her, an arm across her shoulders.

“I’ve got work to do!” She tried to shake him off, but to no avail.

“You’ve just finished two full shifts and a mission. You had a head injury, probably concussion and a nasty cut on your arm – which is gonna scar, by the way. You should’ve let me treat it earlier. You’re in no fit state to go anywhere just yet.” She subsided, with great reluctance.

“How long was I asleep?”

“Eight hours or so? Longer than you’ve managed for weeks, anyway. Don’t _worry_. Everything’s fine – well, as fine as it can be.”

Her gaze fell on the empty bed next to hers, and her eyes started to fill with tears. It must have been her friend’s, the one she’d had to leave behind. She tried to blink the tears away, ashamed by such a public display of emotion, but the harder she tried, the more there seemed to be. Poe had seen this before. Pilots who lost friends and wingmates, then tried to carry on, ignoring the pain building up inside. It never ended well. He had to break her self-control, and he knew one sure-fire way to do that.

He kissed her.

She wrapped her arms around him and kissed him back with all the passion she so rarely let herself acknowledge. Taking only what she needed, giving as much as she could. For a handful of heartbeats, the previous day might never have happened. Then she broke away, buried her face in his shirt and wept. Once the tears and sobs started, they were impossible to stop. He folded his arms around her and rocked her gently from side to side, as his mother used to do. A few tears slipped down his face and landed on her shoulder. At long last, she found enough space between sobs to say, “I knew…”

“Knew what, highness?” The answer took a while.

“I knew what was coming. Tried to warn them. He still died, and she won’t walk again for years, if ever. Why did I survive?”

So that was it. Survivor’s guilt. He knew all about that. “You did your best. It just happens like that sometimes. Take your own advice. You can’t change the past. Focus on the present and try to change the future. Train harder, if it’ll help. Next time, you’ll be faster. Next time, you might save them all.”

“Does that do any good?”

“Kinda. Let’s find out together, shall we?” She managed a smile, and even something that might have been a laugh. The tears had more or less stopped. “Now, I think we both need something to eat, and you need to tidy yourself up a bit. Your spare uniform’s just there. I’ll be outside when you’re ready.”

Five minutes later, a rather neater and almost happy Elinor stepped out of the section at the back of med-bay that formed the nurses’ quarters. She had changed her earrings, Poe noticed, to a pair of silver stars with turquoise centres. Stars and seas: the two of them in a nutshell.

He took her hand as they walked to the mess hall, and for once she didn’t pull away or try to look inconspicuous. The grief and guilt she still felt would stay with her for a long time, like the scar on her arm, but together they could learn to live with that. As her young man or her friend, he would look after her, and he was sure she would look after him.


End file.
